


A Portrait of Dorian Gray

by YellowShapedBox



Category: Death Note
Genre: Dark, Gen, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-05
Updated: 2014-03-05
Packaged: 2018-01-14 16:06:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1272700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YellowShapedBox/pseuds/YellowShapedBox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Most criminals consider Kira their greatest threat. Some couldn't exist without him...</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Portrait of Dorian Gray

**Author's Note:**

> My usual warning label is T-rated but unspecified content. This basically means that I like both to kill characters and to keep the reader on their toes. As you can see, I've done something different here.
> 
> This is a character and worldbuilding sketch. No one dies onscreen, there's nothing graphic, and no skeevy sex situations are included. It is labeled M because despite all this, writing this makes me feel like only a long sabbatical at Cawdor's Sea Salt 'n' Arabian Perfume Luxury Spa will make me feel clean again. 
> 
> And I've headed it with a generic trigger warning, just in case. Though my past experiences seem in line with the kind of person you don't want to trigger, the only trigger I actually have is that pictures of mold make me want to puke. But I'm not taking any chances with this one.

You don't know who I am.

 

I pray it'll always stay that way. I hope no one will ever know who is writing this.

 

Because this is my last confession. I don't intend to die. But I know that I _will_ die, soon. I'll die, or worse, so much worse that I can only think I must die. By the time you see this message, it will already be out of date. I will probably be alive. I will not be worse than dead. But I will have harmed someone.

 

I am a recruit in a photo racket.

 

In this world, anyone who knows your name holds your life in their hands. Those who deny this say what such people always have:  _If you aren't guilty, you have nothing to fear._ But the scope of guilt is widening and widening. Everyone knows this. No one knows what it will eventually encompass. But I am quite certain that one day, dissidents will be guilty. Kira won't need to hide behind sanctioned mobs forever.

 

Many of you aren't so certain. And I guess, at bottom, that's the reason I got a fake ID to begin with. I lost hope that Kira will ever be gone. But it turns out when you act on the belief that all hope is lost,  _that_ is when things truly become hopeless.

 

And that, of course, is how photo rackets ensnare you. False identity is forbidden too. No, it's forbidden  _first._ It's the cardinal sin. If Kira allowed those with false identities to live, then none of his law could hold sway.

 

Photo rackets will not tolerate dead weight. If you are incompetent enough to get caught, you are a liability. If you are caught, you appear on a rogue gallery alongside whatever you have done, and you die. Maybe, if you're lucky, you live long enough to give testimony. But all you can speak to is the cameraman. You never see your dorian.

 

If it had been only me, I might forgive myself. But it wasn't. I went to the cameraman by the side of my best friend. And so the dorian is threatening his life first, and not mine.

 

These, then, are the fates left to me:

 

I get caught, and I die.

 

I balk or turn informant, and I send my friend to his execution.

 

I don't get caught, and I don't balk. I commit any atrocity they ask me to. I become a dorian myself, I make victims into perpetrators for the sake of my gain and my cowardice, I kill them when they are no longer useful to me and destroy them, bit by bit, as long as they do my bidding.

 

I can only hope I am caught. If I were stronger, I might ensure it, but my love of life betrays me. If it came to a sudden heroic charge and a blaze of glory, I know I could sacrifice myself. But it's another matter to wake up in the morning, look into the bathroom mirror, and say to myself in cold blood,  _Today is the day I die._

 

I say to myself that maybe all I need is to buy myself a bit of time. Maybe the dorians will be caught before I am. Maybe Kira will. Maybe someone will look over my shoulder even as I type this and find the sudden burst of motivation they needed all along to get Kira and dorians all in one swoop. Every scenario precisely as likely as the one before it. But it doesn't matter. I want to live.

 

And so I will steal for my dorian. I will swindle, I will run drugs, I will rob and burglarize and terrorize.

 

I was going to type that I won't kill, that I'm not a killer, but if I stop at murder, I'll be a murderer anyway, and it won't be some stranger I kill.

 

But I will never turn dorian. I would see my friend dead, I would savor my last heartbeat, before I ever did to anyone what has been done to me.

 

If I tracked my cameraman, I could find the dorian behind him, I could lead the police to him. But I can't be noticed doing it. And it wouldn't matter to me; I'd wind up serving some other dorian in this twisted pyramid scheme, and this time, I wouldn't know the first thing about how to get to him. If the prime dorian, the one who started it all, winds up behind bars, then every branch beneath him becomes a photo racket all its own.

 

I have no more hope, yet I find it returning, half-cut, in the form of desperation. If Kira goes, then so do the photo rackets. Anyone they haven't consumed and made their own won't be in their power, not in the absolute way we are now, we portraits of Dorian Gray. And maybe they'll find him, they'll capture him or kill him. Maybe they will, you never know. Not for sure.

 

Don't misunderstand me. Kira, that ultimate despot I sought to be spared from, whose shadow I now live under almost every moment... I'm not about to say that he's the true dorian here. This isn't what Kira wanted; I'm probably an acceptable casualty to him, maybe a warning to others who might try for a false identity, but he wouldn't do this to me himself. We're all walking a road to hell paved by Kira's good intentions, but dorians never invested in pretty cobblestones to begin with.

 

Well, the prime dorians didn't. I don't know. Maybe the sub-dorian who has me in his power was just like me, once.

 

If I let them make me a murderer, will I stop at digging up blackmail? That's not murder, that's revenue. Sometimes it's used to kill, and sometimes it's used to recruit, but I'll never know when it is, and I might reassure myself that mostly, it's not. But I'll know that at some point, someone has become a portrait because of me. And why would I subject myself to any more field work, if I've crossed that threshold? All a cameraman does is sit in an office looking like a good Samaritan. Whatever is done by my organization isn't done to me anymore. But the cameraman is the weak link in any photo racket. And after a while of knowing my weakness, of hiding from myself what I do to people, I might think that I'd be much safer pulling the strings.

 

I won't kill, then. If I am ever called upon to kill, I won't balk, not out loud. Privately, I will make the resolution. That will be the day I have to die.

 

They say that when a crime ring wants to get blood on your hands, they will often force you into a situation where you must kill or be killed. That would be best, I think. No need to sustain a resolve that my life is no longer worth living. Just a split-second decision to drop the gun. It's the closest thing to a heroic death I can have, at this point.

 

But either way, the day hasn't come. And I swear to myself that until it does, I will do as much good as I can for people. Anonymous good. The less I know who they are, the less chance I'll be forced to harm them later. A Jekyll-and-Hyde existence, but better that than to falsely tell myself I have no Hyde I need to counterbalance.

 

I don't know why I'm posting this. It's not that I don't have a clear grasp of my situation – nothing has ever been more clear to me – but I don't think I can see past it enough to advise anyone else.

 

I know that, knowing what I know now, I would never have gone for the wallet aspirin. If I hadn't, then my death would just be a heart attack, and I might not expect it, and I wouldn't live my entire life from this day to that dreading it, and I wouldn't do any more evil than I willed myself. And no identity protection is foolproof. Not anyone's. But I don't know how much aspirin is good, and how much is poisoned like mine. I feel that no odds are worth the chance of ending up like me, but intellectually, I know there are very good reasons I used to think otherwise.

 

So I'm not here as any kind of example.

 

I guess I just want to tell someone. Even if you can't ever know who I am.

 

Anon


End file.
